Prosody IM/how to/SSL

In order to get Prosody to use an existing SSL certificate whose files belong to another user ("hypertwins"), I had to do the following:

• edit (or create) the necessary config file under /etc/prosody/conf.avail and link to it from /etc/prosody/conf.d
  • Do NOT activate the SSL section in /etc/prosody/prosody.cfg.lua
• make sure there is a group for sharing SSL certs (on my system, there was already a "ssl-cert" group)
• add user "prosody" to this group
• for certificate files and /home/hypertwins:
  • make sure the each one is are group-readable (chmod 750)
  • chown to hypertwins:ssl-cert (so the group is ssl-cert)
  • You may also need to add www-data to the ssl-cert group so that Apache will still be able to access the virtual domain whose user is "hypertwins".
  • There were permissions issues; I had to use chown -h on the links -- this may also have been unnecessary, even if you're using links
• restart prosody ("service prosody restart") ]
  • note that "reload" is apparently insufficient
• If IM client gives SSL errors
  • check /var/log/prosody.err
  • check file access directly:
    • change user prosody's shell from /bin/false to /bin/bash
    • su prosody (as root)
    • attempt to access the files. If you can see the contents, then prosody can also.

2017-09-30

SSL stopped working again. Apparently the SSL files were renewed three days earlier (9/26) but not given the modified permissions, and it took 2-3 days for Prosody to notice. All I had to do was fix the ownershop ("chown :ssl-cert ssl.*"), "service prosody restart", and then tell Pidgin to reconnect.

I should probably set up a script to do this automatically after the cert renewal.